-DNA The report says India is off course on meeting reduction targets for stunting, anaemia, adult overweight, obesity and diabetes. Yet another global report pointed out India’s worrying performance on various health indicators. India has had consistent poor rankings for stunting and wasting in children under five years of age, anaemia in women and diabetes in adult. The Global Nutrition Report 2016, ranked India 114 for under-5 stunting out of 132 countries,...

-The Hindu Business Line Six districts in AP and Telangana tell the story of nutrition and gender bias Consider two sets of appalling nutrition-linked realities in India. One, almost half the children under five years of age are stunted and two, most Indian girls and women are generally anaemic. Given India’s poverty level, the stunting is not surprising. anaemia among girls and women is also linked to cultural issues. Across the country, boys...

-The Hindu If the Indian government is serious about its commitment to realise the rights of its citizens to universal and equitable health care, it cannot ignore rare diseases. The draft National Health Policy, 2015, makes no mention of them Rare diseases are a diverse set of over 7,000 different conditions that afflict an estimated 1 in 20 Indians and 350 million people worldwide. Put simply, it means that every bus on...

Although there is sufficient data and evidence available in the public domain to argue whether there has been halving of poverty between 1990 and 2015, the same cannot be said with conviction about the halving of hunger—one of the targets set under the erstwhile Millennium Development Goals framework (replaced recently by SDGs). This is because the recently released data by the National Family Health Survey-4 (conducted in 2015-16) and the...

-The Times of India NEW DELHI: In a move that will benefit over 27 crore children across the country, the health ministry has expanded its deworming programme to convert it into a national initiative seeking to cover as many as 536 districts over the next one year. The programme was earlier limited to 277 districts in 11 high-burden states, and covered nine crore children in 2015. The government has decided to ramp...